If any of my readers share my passion for classic cars (rare enough I think) and Bristols in particular do click on something I wrote about my brief one year experience of owning one of these great machines while at university in Sydney Australia in 1966. I came across this amusing and terribly nostalgic essay concerning my youth quite by chance.

This link is to the story now on a cloud, originally on a website set up by the peerless Ashley James in the UK who restored a Bristol 400 to perfection.

His brilliant technical and advice website concerning his long history and restoration of the magnificent Bentley Mk VI model, his restoration of an Austin-Healey Mk III and many fascinating articles from fellow enthusiasts are also available. Well worth reading whatever classic car you own or are planning to own. Excellent objective advice that removes the rose-tinted spectacles we are all prone to wearing.

As he puts it:

This is a website created to provide classic and vintage car enthusiasts with genuinely useful information.

I have recently been reading with the greatest pleasure the well written, quite wonderful and meticulously researched Bristol Cars: A Very British Story by Christopher Balfour (Haynes 2009). Highly recommended.

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Swiss physicist Alain Kohler said he found this 1847 photo of a daguerreotype image of Fryderyk Chopin in the private collection of a musician in Switzerland. It's believed to be only the second confirmed photographic image of the composer. (Institut Polonais Paris) [Courtesy of CBC News 20 January 2017]

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In this 71st year of the festival, the artistic director Piotr Paleczny has assembled a quite remarkable array of famous, musically outstanding and charismatic pianists many of them prize-winners in international competitions. Most of the greatest pianists playing on the international stage today have appeared at Duszniki Zdroj, many at the very beginnings of their pianistic careers or shortly after winning major international competitions. A modicum of 'ancient' history first. Part of the way through his studies Joseph Elsner recommended that Chopin ‘take the waters’ or 'go into rehab' not far from where Elsner was born in the small Silesian spa of Bad Reinerz (now Duszniki Zdrój). Originally on the Prussian-Bohemian frontier, the village is now in the south-west of Poland on the border wit…

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Australian author and classical musician.
He seriously studied the piano and harpsichord in London for many years.
His piano teacher was Eileen Ralf, a former professor at the Royal Academy of Music and the inspiring teacher of the great Australian pianist Geoffrey Tozer.
His harpsichord teacher was Maria Boxall, editor of the keyboard works of the English Baroque composer and organist John Blow as well as a renowned Harpsichord Method.
He yearns for the South Pacific islands but through a number of unlikely events and coincidences beached up on the cold shores of the Baltic.